Frank Gaudlitz @ Fotogalerie Friedrichshain

“Since 2005, Berlin photographer Frank Gaudlitz has been working intensively in South America. For his project La Ruta del Sol, which will be exhibited for the first time in Berlin at the Fotogalerie Friedrichshain, Gaudlitz took his inspiration from the famous German naturalist and philosopher, Alexander von Humboldt.

In 1801, Humboldt travelled unknowingly along the nearly 2500 km Pan-American Inca Road of the Sun through Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. He believed that the universe is one interacting entity. Humbolt’s journey on this ancient road, consequently, was one of constant observation, always attentive to not only the physical world around him but equally to the local social, cultural, and economic conditions he encountered.

Frank Gaudlitz provides a visual reiteration of Humboldt’s perspective as his photographs were taken in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru and comprise black and white landscape images as well as environmental portraits of those he met along the way. If his portraits provide a mirror of social structure as it exists today, the imagery of the landscape photographs is more timeless and stretches a bridge into the past: Humboldt’s landscape and the Road of the Sun the Inca’s traveled. ”